Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018

Entrainment
The Formation of Reality

As we have seen, bioenergetics deals with the flow of energy within an organism and between the organism and its environment. This interplay of energies forms the basis for our examination of the perception of reality. For an individual, “within” pertains to all that is inside the energy body, including cohesion and the assemblage point, and “its environment” relates to everything else, including other people, groups, views of reality, all aspects of nature, and emanations. The meeting point is uniformity, the boundary of the energy body. This framework provides for a deeper understanding of how a tiny spark of energy—the human organism—deals with the surrounding immensity of the cosmos.

Two fundamental processes within the energy body—learning and imagination—correspond to the first two energy fields. Learning is that which has been actualized or realized, to what is known: the province of the first energy field, no matter how large or small the cohesion, no matter the subject. Imagination is of the second energy field. It permits rapid expansion of awareness, stepping beyond what is known into what can become known. It is a dance with potential.

Integrating the first and second fields via learning and imagination has the effect of bringing more of our energy body to life. The third field serves to highlight the vast expanse of what may be learned and imagined.

Entrainment

Learning and imagination are both impacted by entrainment, or alignment as it is sometimes called, which centers on the ability to shift cohesion. Put another way, entrainment describes the process of one type of energy influencing another by their coming into resonance. Just as the heat from burning wood in a fireplace influences the temperature of a room, all forms of energy influence the internal and external environments of the energy body. The entraining effect may be a condition or other energy. For instance, books—especially textbooks—are significant forces of entrainment. In sociology, it could be viewed as resulting from peer pressure or institutional learning. Your arithmetic teacher entrained your thinking along the lines of addition, subtraction, and so on. In physics, entrainment applies to two oscillating bodies entering into phase with each other. In meteorology, it pertains to one wind stream capturing another.¹

Our social world develops through an enormous number of entraining influences that combine to form what we consider to be reality. Confining perception to a physical world of objects results from entraining to that model of reality. When natural abilities surface, such as seeing (perceiving energy), we have been taught to disregard those observations because they do not fit the world we have been entrained to perceive.

The culture of your upbringing holds dramatic sway over your perception. If you consort with criminals, you stand an increased chance of entraining to their energy. If you associate with people who are principled, you are influenced to be this way. If you overly entrain to a world-view, you become fundamentalist. If you entrain to source energy, you might step into a mystical experience.

Even though learning and imagination are both subject to the mechanics of entrainment, together they form a powerful way to manage it. Learning is the process of transforming potential into actualization, which, in a sleight-of-hand manner, also includes the use of imagination. In turn, imagination expands perception beyond the known limits of reality and helps to quicken learning. Imagination can therefore be applied to break the chains of conditional energy fields. Integrating the resulting experiences requires learning. Without this coordination, you can’t form deep and lasting relationships among aspects of self, between conscious and unconscious, and between self and environment. Without learning, you may become lost in imagination. Without imagination, you may become lost in dogma. In leapfrog fashion, learning and imagination work together to stimulate, shift, and stabilize cohesion.